The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (9 page)

“I’m betting he’ll have to do his explaining first,” Gibby said. “Anyhow we can worry later. Watch this now.”

We watched. Bannerman came quietly up behind the girl. He put his hands over her eyes. Her reaction time was the quickest I’ve ever seen. It was as though he had pulled a trigger. She whirled around and with a full swing of arm and body she slapped him. That was a slap. The crack of it echoed and re-echoed in that vast marble enclosure. Bannerman rocked on his heels and touched his hand to his reddened cheek. Then and only then, the girl screamed.

“Milty. No, Milty, you’re not here. Your tram isn’t in yet.”

We were in luck. We could see his face full on. Since he didn’t scream back at her we couldn’t hear but we could watch his lips and read them. Lip reading ordinarily isn’t one of Gibby’s talents nor is it one of mine but when you have a pretty good idea of what a man might say, you can make a good stab at telling whether the lip movements fit with what you think he’s saying.

“I got away earlier than I thought I could.”

If those weren’t the exact words, they came very close.

Since all he said was that or something very like it, I was completely unprepared for her next move. After the violence of her immediate reaction to the shock he had given her, I was all the more unprepared for it. She swayed dizzily and reached a hand out toward him. Before she touched him, however, the hand wavered and she dropped at his feet and lay there. Joan Loomis had fainted.

Gibby laughed. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

Practically everybody within fifty feet was now converging on Bannerman and the girl. You know how people are. Anything like that happens and in no time you have a crowd gathered around it. Our friend in the brown hat didn’t move. He did keep a sharp eye on the gathering crowd but he showed no inclination toward joining it.

“I’m stupid,” I said. “Fill me in. What did that get us?”

“It got us the information that Miss Loomis’ nerves are in a state where they go off like firecrackers. Her reaction to hands coming around her unexpectedly is quick and violent, but her reaction to any deviation from timetable is worse than that—catastrophic at least.”

It was an answer of sorts. I tabled it for later consideration and tried another question.

“Our friend in the brown hat,” I said, “is interested but it’s a most aloof interest. Do you like that, too?”

“It has me enthralled,” Gibby said. “Let’s go.”

I didn’t quite know where we were going but Gibby moved and I moved with him. We moved in on brown hat. Coming up alongside him, Gibby gave it the jolly good-fellowship touch.

“What made Mae’s party go sour?” he asked.

If Joan Loomis had demonstrated the jumpiness of her nerves, the man in the brown hat wasn’t far behind. He jumped a country mile. I think his first impulse was to cut and run but he stood fast and let us watch him take a grip on himself.

“Oh,” he said, half strangling on the words. “It’s you again.”

“Some days it’s like that,” Gibby said. “Even in a town as big as this, you keep bumping into the same people wherever you go.”

“Yeah,” the man muttered. “’Specially in Grand Central Station. Great spot for meeting people, Grand Central Station.”

“You’re meeting someone?” Gibby asked.

“The big boy. I’ve been worrying about him.”

“You mean Jellicoe?”

The man laughed. “You did think I was kidnaping him,” he said. “I can see you’ve been checking up. There’s one comfort anyhow. Whatever he’s doing, the drunken bastard isn’t driving. We’ve got his car.”

“Last we saw, you had him. How’d he get away from you?”

The man shrugged. “I still got a lot to learn,” he said. “He tells me he’s got to go to the john. If I was smart I would have gone in with him but do you figure a drunk, he’s going to be so tricky, he’ll find a john it’s got two entrances? I wait where he went in but that ain’t where he comes out, the tricky son-of-a-bitch.”

“And after he went to all that trouble to shake you, you’re expecting him to keep a date here?”

“He don’t know we got a date,” the man said. “I’m probably wasting my time. Maybe he won’t go home to Connecticut at all. Maybe he’ll get in a taxi and ride that way all the way to the country. If it’s like that, there’s nothing I can do about it; but there’s just the chance. Not having his car, he might take the train. He comes here to take the train, I pick him up.”

Gibby grinned. “How do you know he’s that drunk?” he asked. “What makes you think he’s drunk enough to go out on an incoming train?”

I expected he would have to spell that out before he could have any answer to it, but I was wrong. The man caught it on the first bounce.

“I check every train that goes out to his neck of the woods,” the man explained. “Between trains this is as good a place to wait as any. I can’t watch all the entrances to the lower level where them commuters’ trains go out, but that over there is one way in.”

“That over there” was an entrance to the station’s lower level, but it was a direction to which the man had kept his back steadily turned up to the time when Gibby had accosted him. So far as I could determine, he was facing that way now only because he’d had to turn to talk to us.

“What do you want with Jellicoe?” Gibby asked.

“I want to take him home if I can. Even Jellicoe sobers up for a while in the morning. He sobers up and you’ve been taking care of him, he’s grateful. That’s always a nice piece of change, Jellicoe’s gratitude.”

“Better than rolling him when he’s drunk?” Gibby asked.

The man started to take offense at that question. I was ready to predict every word he would say, all the protestations that he was being misjudged. I have a hunch that he read it in our faces that we were way ahead of him. He switched away from any pretensions to innocence.

“A lot better,” he said. “You can roll a drunk, sure, and what have you got? A one-time shot. Gratitude can happen all the time, again and again and again. It can be as good as a meal ticket.”

Gibby nodded. “Worth the effort,” he said. “But you have to work at it. Jellicoe could have gone by you a dozen times while you were busy giving the dame the eye.”

“I suppose. I was trying to make up my mind. That’s a real nice-looking little tomato. I’m thinking maybe I’ll say to hell with Jellicoe and have a try at making that. If you seen me giving her the eye, you also seen what happened to the guy who did try to make her. I saw that, it put my mind back on Jellicoe, but who can blame me for thinking about it? Like they say, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Gibby laughed. “Okay, Jack,” he said. “We’ll be seeing you.”

Joan Loomis had been revived. She was on her feet and Bannerman was helping her toward the waiting room. Her walking was a bit rubber-kneed but she was managing all right. She had a station policeman supporting her on the other side.

We strolled off after them. A handful of the crowd she had gathered was also strolling that way. The rest of the people were reluctantly taking off to meet those trains they had come to meet.

“How did we do with brown hat?” I asked.

“You can’t win all the time,” Gibby said.

“We lost on that one?”

“Gave as much as we got.”

Going through the big main rotunda of the station we made a small detour before going into the waiting room to join Bannerman and his girl. Gibby stopped at the information desk to pick up the New Haven timetable, the big one that lists all the line’s trains in and out of New York. Dropping it into his pocket, he made for the waiting room.

The minute we came up to the bench where Bannerman and the cop had settled the white-faced Miss Loomis, Bannerman rounded on us angrily. It seemed to me that we had done just about as well in this quarter as we had with Jellicoe’s self-appointed bodyguard. Here too, I thought, we had given as much as we got. Gibby could be as pleased as he liked with the bits of information he had drawn out of that little drama he had staged, but for those bits it looked as though we were going to have to pay the price of Bannerman’s hostility. Any further co-operation we might need from that lad I was ready to write off as a dead loss. He had done all the co-operating we could expect of him. He said as much.

“That was a dandy idea of yours,” he snarled. “It was one jim-dandy.”

Of course, the original expectation had been that if he did follow instructions he would end up resentful of us because of the burden that would have been laid on his conscience by Gibby’s requirement that he lie to his Joanie. Now, of course, that part of it was quite all right. He had had no time to tell her anything, whether true or false. Her faint had taken care of that part of it. That faint, however, I hadn’t foreseen any more than I had foreseen the slap in the jaw, and now it was for those we were being blamed. Actually it was because of the girl’s fainting that Bannerman was angry with us even though moment by moment she was making a better recovery from that than he was making from the slap. Even as he harangued us, the color was coming back into her face. The mark of her hand on his face wasn’t fading that fast. She had really let him have it.

Gibby let Bannerman blow off his steam. He said nothing until Bannerman had paused for breath and even then Gibby made no direct answer. Bypassing Bannerman, Gibby spoke to the girl. He introduced himself and he introduced me. He explained that we were from the DA’s office.

“Did you know that you were being followed?” he asked.

“Followed? What do you mean followed?”

“A man was following you.”

She shuddered. “Oh, that,” she said. “Everywhere I go in this horrible town it happens. Men follow me or they look at me as though they were trying to hypnotize me or something or they come right up to me and ask me where I’m going and can’t they help me find it. Don’t New York men have anything else to do? Do they have their whole day free for bothering women?”

“Some make a career of it,” Gibby said. “Then you knew that a man followed you into the station, that you were being watched all the time?”

“If it wasn’t one man it was another. I didn’t notice that there was a man just then but they’ve got me so jumpy, all of them, that when Milton came up behind me and put his hands over my eyes, it never occurred to me that it could be anything but another one. That’s why I slapped him, I didn’t care who it was. I wanted to tear his eyes out.”

“Yes,” Gibby said. “We saw you. I must apologize. It was my idea. I wanted to make that fellow who had been following you commit himself. I am sorry, particularly since it didn’t work. He didn’t commit himself at all.”

“Commit himself how?”

“Any way at all. I’m afraid you have been in danger, Miss Loomis, and I can’t be certain that you are not still in danger. The more we know about the nature of this danger, the better we can head it off.”

She reached out her hand to Bannerman. He took it and held it.

“I’ve been in danger,” she said, “and I can tell you exactly what the danger is. I’m with Milton now. I’ll be all right.”

“We have to be certain of that,” Gibby insisted. “We can’t take any chances with your safety. What was the danger, Miss Loomis?”

“N-e-w Y-o-r-k,” she said, spelling it out for him letter by letter. “New York. This is a terrible place. Maybe if a girl knows it, she can learn how to cope with it—all those awful men—but I don’t think I could ever learn to cope and I can tell you I’m mighty glad I don’t have to try. Milton’s with me now and we’re going home to River Forks just as fast as ever we can. If I never see this place again, it will be too soon.”

Gibby turned to Bannerman. “Fainting the way she did,” he said, “she’s probably hungry. Do you know? Has she had any dinner?”

Bannerman turned to the girl.

“Of course, I had dinner,” she said. “I found a place. It isn’t far from here, as a matter of fact, and it’s clean and quite expensive enough. It was almost two o’clock before I found that because I didn’t know where to go. The places Ellie goes, Milt, they’re simply awful. When I tried to find something for myself, all the places I looked at were bad enough till I found this one.”

There was a small misunderstanding there but it wasn’t of any consequence. River Forks, of course, dined at midday, but Gibby passed that by. He was more interested in these places Ellie went, the awful ones. He asked about them.

“They all had bars in them,” Miss Loomis explained. “Drinking places. Of course, we didn’t drink, but still. No matter when you went in, there would be people drinking, women and men, women just by themselves even, drinking. But it’s the prices. The prices are simply scandalous. There’s a thing they call chef’s salad Ellie’s always eating and it’s nothing but a lot of lettuce and stuff like that and it has a little bit of cut-up chicken in it. They cut it up fine and spread it around to make it look as though there were really a decent lot of chicken, but if they have twenty-five cents’ worth of chicken in the whole thing, that’s a lot, and do you know what they charge for it? Just guess.”

We let Bannerman guess. He guessed a dollar.

Miss Loomis laughed bitterly. “Two dollars and fifty cents,” she said. “And that isn’t all. They charge separately for bread and butter and Ellie never eats any. She doesn’t touch it but she pays for it all the same, bread and butter she doesn’t even eat. It’s really too awful.”

“It sure is,” Gibby said, “but people do have to eat. I know what’s wrong with you, young woman. Even though you did find this place at two o’clock, you didn’t eat nearly enough and now it’s long past your supper time. You’re starved. That’s your trouble.”

I’m not going to go into all the to-do we had about getting them out of the station and over to a restaurant where we could both eat and talk. This place she had found that didn’t shock her too much was the Automat, and even the medium-priced place Gibby selected scandalized both her and Milton. They didn’t like being in a place with a bar and the prices were against their principles even though we were paying.

We finally got them to order something and Gibby was able to settle in to asking questions. He started out by telling the girl that we had been very much worried about her.